Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur, investor (partner at Greylock Partners, one of the oldest Silicon Valley venture capital firms), and author, best known for founding the professional social network LinkedIn.

Reid is also part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, the group of entrepreneurs who were members of the PayPal team and, after selling it to eBay, went on to create successful businesses, such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others.

He studied at Stanford University, where he met his future business partner Peter Thiel, and graduated in 1990 with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science.

Reid decided he wants to influence the world. He first thought to become a professor, but then realized that an entrepreneurial career will likely make him able to change things on a larger scale.

In 1994, he worked at Apple as a Senior User Experience Architect, at an early attempt to create a social network. He left and joined Fujitsu where he held the title Director of Product Management and Development for WorldsAway, one of the earliest successful virtual worlds.

Before the dot-com boom, Reid co-founded SocialNet.com, a startup that matched people with similar interests, where he was responsible for vision, management and product development.

During the same period, he joined Peter Thiel at PayPal as an Executive Vice President and a member of board of directors, where he was responsible for all external relationships, PR, strategy, payment innovations and customers service.

Reid later co-founded and was the CEO of LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network that now has over 500 million members. He sold the company to Microsoft in 2016 – he’s now a board member of Microsoft, and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn.

He is also an investor at Greylock Partners VC firm, whose portfolio includes companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pandora, Instagram, Palo Alto Networks, Workday, Nextdoor, Rubrik, Okta, and others. Reid represents Greylock on the board of several startups.

Reid has co-authored several books, his first one being the bestselling career book The Start-Up of You. In 2018, his new book Blitzscaling came out, which states that the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies is “blitzscaling”, a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. In that book, he shares what he learned from the companies he invested in.